Sufferance

by Thomas King

  Nutty nods. “Roman probably saved our lives.”

  Roman runs a hand through his hair. “They damn well should arrest themselves.”

  “Billy Paul tried a little on one of his windows,” says Ada, “and now he can’t get it open.”

  “Probably saved our lives,” says Nutty.

  I get a plate and help myself to a piece of cake.

  “So how old are you?” says Roman.

  “Don’t matter,” says Nutty. “There’s alive and then there ain’t.”

  “She’ll be here next year,” says Ada. “None of us is going anywhere.”

  “And your daughter is coming home,” says Nutty. “Can’t wait to see that Lala.”

  Ada looks at Roman. “Maybe her father can lend a hand.”

  Roman shrugs Ada off. “Me and Emma got shit to work out.”

  Ada doesn’t budge. “Try explaining that to a child.”

  Nutty tosses the crow a peanut. “Sweet little girl,” she says. “Best birthday present I can think of.”

  The cake is good. Moist and tasty with a butter frosting. Slick doesn’t know what he’s missing, and I’m not about to tell him.

  “No powwow this year,” says Roman. “But I figure we’ll have a protest in the plaza. Set up the big drum.”

  “You should have Jeremiah sit in,” says Nutty.

  Roman looks at me. “You know how to sing?”

  “He can keep a beat,” says Nutty. “And he’s one of us.”

  “Not so you could tell,” says Ada.

  “Still family.”

  “Sure,” says Ada, “but there’s more to being Cradle River than having been born here.”

  “Let you use my old drumstick,” says Roman. “Still got pretty good flex.”

  “Have another piece of cake,” says Nutty, the cough worse than before. “Moving them stones can wear a body.”

  IT’S JUST AFTER NOON when I get back to the school. I could work in the graveyard or I could take a nap. I could walk the river or play with the cat. But I’m not sure I want to do anything. So, for the first little while, I stand at the kitchen window and look out.

  There’s nothing to see, but I know that if I stand here long enough, something is bound to come along.

  12

  As it turns out, I don’t have to wait long.

  I’m thinking about lunch when the kid appears at the far side of the graveyard. Not old enough to have shoulders. Or hips and a butt, for that matter. His clothes hang off him like wet laundry on a line. Jeans, grey hoodie, red tennis shoes.

  The pack on his back weighs more than he does.

  I run through the possibilities. Sales, home maintenance, charity. Buy our new phone service. Mow your lawn, paint your house. There’s a starving child in Africa who needs your generosity.

  He’s not an evangelical. They’re better dressed, and they travel in packs.

  Not that it matters. He might get to the porch and the door, but he won’t get any further. I send unfriendly thoughts into the afternoon to discourage him from even trying.

  And then I see the camera.

  THE LOCKEN GROUP found me at a job fair. They had what they called a “skills booth” set up. National competition. Four computer monitors on the back wall, a tumble of images, discordant music and sounds. One question. Thirty-second time limit. Give it a try. What do you see? Winners get a paid summer internship.

  I did it in eleven seconds.

  THE KID’S NAME IS Brian Busby and he’s been hired by Maribelle Wegman and the Gleaming city council to photograph the graveyard.

  “Do a lot of work for her committee,” says Busby. “Mostly historic houses and buildings. This is my first boneyard.”

  Up close, Brian isn’t as young as he looks.

  “Telephoto lens,” he tells me. “This way, I don’t have to set foot on your property. Avoid any problems with jurisdiction or trespass.”

  THAT SUMMER at the Locken Group was not what I expected. I assumed that I would be shackled to a small desk in a large room, staring at a computer screen, under the scrutiny of a camp commandant.

  Instead, on my first day, I was taken to a windowless room with nine other individuals, men and women. There was no pattern to gender, race, religion, or age. We were all strangers. We would remain strangers.

  And except for that single day, we never saw each other again.

  The morning was given over to Human Resources and their skid of paperwork, a seemingly endless parade of agreements, non-disclosure documents, personal history, health forms, and the like, all requiring signatures and blood oaths.

  Lunch was brought in promptly at noon. At 1:15, Thomas Locken walked in the room and waited while two assistants handed each of us a thin manila envelope.

  Inside was a single sheet of paper with a single question.

  “You’re here,” Locken told us, “because you are smart. Just how smart is yet to be discovered.”

  Locken walked back and forth across the front of the room, slowly, as though he were waiting for his thoughts to catch up with his body.

  “You will have full access to Locken’s resources and research platforms. You will not discuss your work with the media or with any individual not previously cleared by Locken legal. This includes parents, spouses, significant others, friends, colleagues, along with enemies at home and abroad who seek to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

  It took a couple of beats before anyone laughed, even though it was obvious that we all knew the reference.

  “You have one week to answer the question.”

  And with that, Thomas Locken gave us all a quick smile and walked out the door.

  BUSBY SHOWS ME some of the shots he’s taken. With the long lens shortening the distances and crowding the depth of field, the crosses look imposing and surreal.

  “I could use a wide-angle lens,” he says, “but then you get a completely different effect.”

  He lets me play with the camera, take a couple of shots.

  “You have a knack,” he tells me, as we check the display. “Good news is you don’t have to shell out a bundle for a DSLR. You can take amazing photos with the new generation of cellphones.”

  Busby doesn’t stay long. When he’s done, he hands me a card.

  “Check out my website,” he says. “Heritage stuff and weddings pay the bills, but my first love is street photography. You know the Neighbours? I’ve got some really great shots of the Neighbours.”

  I don’t tell him that I don’t have a computer or a cellphone, that I’m not going to visit his website. Being anti-social is one thing. Mean is quite another.

  So, the town is serious. Mayor Bob’s real estate dreams, Maribelle Wegman’s sense of heritage and authority. Buy the school. Move the graveyard. Appropriate the reserve. Have Busby photograph the families as they are herded into cars and onto buses, shipped off to a destination to be named later.

  Nibble and chew until there is nothing left but bones.

  I NEVER HEARD how I did on the question, but when the summer ended, I was offered a permanent position. After that first day, I didn’t see Locken again. I did my research, filed my reports, made my recommendations.

  And then I was summoned.

  I came to work one morning to find a note on my desk that simply said, “2200. 9:30.”

  The twenty-second floor was Thomas Locken’s personal domain. There were rumours that imagined Locken’s office as an ornate collection of dark woods and Persian rugs, floor-to-ceiling bookcases and overstuffed chairs, an obligatory bar of single malts, Constables and Turners on the walls, a sanctuary reached only via a high-speed, private elevator with palm-print and facial recognition, and a full-body millimetre-wave scanner.

  All guarded by a secretary from Newark, New Jersey, and a three-headed dog.

  Instead, Thomas Locken’s office was surprisingly bare. No desk. No computer. No bank of televisions. The furniture, what there was of it, consisted of two leather sofas facing
each other with a long coffee table thrown in between them.

  No executive bar. No landscapes on the walls. No dog.

  Locken was at the windows, looking out.

  “If you stand here long enough,” he said, without turning around, “you might believe you’re in charge of the world.”

  I waited, not quite sure what to do.

  “Jeremiah Camp,” said Locken. “Did you know that you still have the best time? In the job-fair competition?”

  Locken turned to me.

  “You predicted the S&L collapse.”

  That hadn’t been particularly perceptive on my part. The patterns had been clear enough. But even after the collapse of Home State Savings Bank in Cincinnati in 1985 and Midwest Federal Savings & Loan in Minneapolis in 1989, the financial community had continued to pretend that these were minor aberrations in the business model, had persisted in ignoring the massive fraud and rampant greed that was at the heart of the debacle.

  “Dot.com, Enron, China and India, Madoff, the collapse of Wall Street. One or two of these might be attributed to luck. But you saw them all.”

  I hadn’t seen 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina or the Gorkha earthquake in Nepal or the worldwide heat wave of 2015.

  Thomas Locken came away from the window, sat on the far sofa, leaned back. “So tell me,” he said. “What do you know about telomeres?”

  AS SOON AS BUSBY LEAVES, the crows arrive. Today, they eschew the trees. Several land on the crosses to keep watch, while the rest walk the ground. They strut and hop among the graves, with no more regard for the dead than they have for the living.

  They’re cautious birds. They trust only what they can see and hear, and little else. Promises mean nothing to them. Friendships are rare, but routines are common. Feed crows, and after a while, they will come back each day to see if there is more food. If there is, the crows will eat it and fly away. If the plate is bare, the birds will fly away.

  No harm, no foul.

  No harm, no foul? I can’t believe I said that. The crows continue their foraging, oblivious to my wit. Certainly, no one is laughing. I watch the birds for a while, in case they want to share funny stories or reveal what they know about the world.

  And then my stomach reminds me that I haven’t had lunch. I slip out of the graveyard, leave the crows to their own appetites, and drag mine back up the path to the school.

  LUNCH ON THE TWENTY-SECOND floor of the Locken tower was catered. It arrived on a wheeled tray and was laid out on the coffee table with quiet ceremony.

  “I’m told,” Locken said, “there are complex organisms in the world that do not die.”

  I tried a bit of everything. The sushi was tempura shrimp and avocado, the chicken sizzling in a black bean sauce.

  “Turritopsis dohrnii.” Locken sat with his hands folded on his stomach. “It’s a jellyfish. Small, transparent. Evidently, they’re able to turn back time. They age and then they retrace their steps back to childhood. Amazing little beggars. They switch back and forth between life stages. Theoretically, and perhaps actually, these organisms can live forever.”

  There were pan-fried gyozas and vegetable spring rolls. Along with green tea and warm sake.

  “And then there are Hydra. Here, instead of deteriorating over time, Hydra have the capacity for infinite self-renewal. A set of genes called Fox genes, found in all animals, plays a vital role in regulating just how long cells live. Hydra happen to have an overabundance of Fox genes.”

  I decided on the tea.

  “Lobsters can repair their DNA thanks to a never-ending supply of an enzyme called telomerase, but they continually outgrow their shells. And the energy needed to create new shells is finally too much for the organism. The protective end caps on chromosomes, the telomeres, slowly get shorter and shorter, and when they’re too short, a cell enters senescence and cannot keep dividing. And when that happens, the lobster dies.”

  Locken helped himself to the sake.

  “You also have naked mole rats, a quahog clam named Ming, and bristlecone pines. Utterly fascinating. Humans have telomeres, but the levels of telomerase in most cells is not sufficient to rebuild the telomeres.”

  And then he went silent. We sat there in his office with the corner windows overlooking the lakeshore and picked at the food set before us.

  “We spend our waking moments,” he said at last, “trying to be successful, because we can’t think of anything else to do.”

  And then Locken told me what he wanted done.

  I STAND IN THE KITCHEN and consider lunch. I get as far as taking an egg out of the refrigerator and no further. I don’t think I’m depressed, but that’s the wonderful thing about depression.

  It doesn’t care what you think.

  It was the cake. Nutty’s birthday cake with the chocolate butter icing. I had a large piece. There’s the reason for my malaise. Too much sugar. Along with the bother of finding young Busby mapping my home with his camera.

  I’ll recover, of course. My appetite will return. And if I look hard enough, I might even find something that passes for optimism.

  13

  Ever since Gleaming cut off services to the reserve, Cradle River First Nations has been operating on generator power and bottled water. There has been more than one meeting between the town and the reserve on the subject, but so far, the only things to have come out of these efforts have been hard feelings and bad language.

  Along with the occasional confrontation.

  After the city discontinued services, maintenance discovered that one of their utility trucks had been inadvertently left on the reserve. When workers went to retrieve it, they were told, in no uncertain terms, that they could not come onto Cradle River land and that the truck now belonged to the band council.

  “Real standoff,” Florence reported over coffee. “Almost had a hockey game on our hands.”

  For the next while, the truck was shuffled around the reserve in a running shell game. At one point, no one knew exactly where it was, it had been moved so many times.

  “You never know just how handy a pickup can be,” Nutty told me, “until you have one.”

  Almost immediately, the Gleaming Advertiser created a box on the back page of the paper to show the number of days the truck had been held hostage, and the band council countered, suggesting that while the Advertiser was at it, they might want to keep track of the number of years Cradle River had been waiting for their land claim to be settled.

  “No winners,” said Florence, “but it was a lot of fun.”

  Three weeks into the standoff, the truck was returned, dropped off in front of city hall in the middle of the night, washed, its gas tank empty.

  THE AFTERNOON HAS WARMED beyond expectations, and I decide to leave the graveyard for another day. I’m not opposed to manual labour, find working with my hands more satisfying than sitting behind a desk, but sweating holds little appeal.

  I’ll pull up crosses and move stones tomorrow. Today, I’ll simply wander. Head off in one direction or another and keep walking. Until I feel like stopping.

  The river path is coming to life. None of the trees has its leaves yet, but nips of green have appeared against the dark branches. Along the bank, the grasses are returning, while the river itself is now free of ice. At the fork, I turn away from town and follow the path to Broken Bough Falls. Here, the river rushes over the edge of the escarpment and plunges a hundred feet into a deep pool.

  And disappears.

  The Cradle River’s great claim to fame. A watercourse that vanishes into the earth and is never seen again.

  The Cradle River is not the only such phenomenon. Devil’s Kettle in Minnesota performs much the same trick, with the water hitting a rock outcropping and splitting into two streams. One stream keeps on going, winding up in Lake Superior, while the other side drops into a large pothole and is swallowed whole and complete.

  The river trail ends in a small turnout with a bench where you can sit and listen to the water thunder
over the edge and watch the spray rise into the air.

  I see Roman before I hear the horn.

  He’s on the bench with his cornet, eyes closed, fingers working the valves, the sound drowned out by the falls. I catch snatches of the piece.

  “Caruso” by Lucio Dalla.

  Roman plays the song slowly, the horn aimed at the ground, as though he’s trying to bury the sound. I take one step back. He sees me and sets the horn to the side.

  “This is one of my favourite places,” he says. “Used to come here when I was a kid. Throw shit into the river. Watch it go over the falls.”

  Roman leans back on the bench and stretches.

  “Couple of times, I thought about going over myself. You know, get life over with rather than wait around to see what new crap it’s going to dump on you.”

  The sun hits the fast water at an angle, fire and polished steel.

  “But I didn’t. Became a musician, didn’t I. Damn good one, too. Played all over the world. Made good money. Big success.”

  I watch the water as it roars over the edge. I can see the attraction. Lean out. Let go.

  “And yet here I am. Back on the reserve. Playing for a piece of the door at outhouse clubs where nobody can tell a cornet from a condom.”

  Roman runs a quick blues scale. “Funny thing is, I don’t know which is the success and which is the failure. Not even sure it much matters.”

  The spray from the falls shifts directions and fills the air.

  “So why did you come back?” Roman opens a spit valve and clears the horn. “Big-city job. Big-city money. Enough money to buy the old school. Enough money to be able to lock yourself away from the rest of us.”

  I can see that if we stay much longer, we’ll both be soaked.

  “How’s that working out?”

  Not that I mind getting wet. Worse things happen when you’re not paying attention.

  “Ada tell you my sad tale? Town council cut water and power to the reserve? No good reason. Just trying to drive us out, so they can take our land. So I cut off power to the council. Quid pro quo.”